


Gods (and a Goddess)

by kittywiz



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: And I want to shove it somewhere thus, Gen, Honestly not as dark as it sounds, How Do I Tag, I don't want to tag them now though just in case, Its really more like this idea ate my brain, Not Beta Read, Or as dramatic, Other characters from PJO will show up, Thats just me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-10-25 21:04:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20730731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittywiz/pseuds/kittywiz
Summary: A part of Homura-the crying, lonely child in her soul that held onto guns, onto rifles, grenades, missiles, bazookas for strength-mourns the way the world once was because while that world was a grey-almost-black, she blended in. She made herself blend in, warped the parts of her that were lighter than they should be, dyed them black for a girl that's no longer alive and then-then it was easier.Easier to fight, easier to breathe, easier to try, easier to fail.Easier to get back up and try again with the hopes for a next time.It is harder now that she is a shade darker than the rest of them with no goal to have and only a pair of red ribbons to remember the old world by. And then it isn't.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So. I thought I was done with Homura feels two character study fics later.  
Clearly, that is not the case.

One moment she's with a person she would sacrifice everything for, had sacrificed everything for and then something lets her go.

  
She gives the nurse in her room changing the IV drip a scare when her heart rate spikes as she wakes up to pale white walls and two red strands clutched abnormally tight in her right hand.

* * *

  
Mitakihara Hospital releases her with an abnormally clean bill of health two weeks later to an aunt, an uncle-step uncle her aunt says-and a cousin that she doesn't quite remember having. They're oddly mismatched, and not just because of how out of place her uncle looks-he's so very American that he sticks out under the fluorescent lighting with his blonde hair and green eyes-but she can pick up having seen them before somewhere.

  
Its startling enough to see old faces made blurry with the time she spent in a hospital room-with the time she spent fighting, fighting, fighting-that she's numb with shock their entire visit. The message of how 'your parents were in a car crash a couple months ago we're sorry to only be here now' barely phases her and their faces colored with concern at her slow nods are so painted with pity she almost chokes.

  
The cousin is the odd one and it is for the strange curiosity that his silence brings that she finds her attention snapping to him moreso than her aunt and uncle.

  
For one he hardly looks in her direction, preferring to fiddle with his necklace. Two, the guy's wearing a bright ass orange shirt that reads "Camp Half-Blood" with a weird dark stain that's splattered across the bottom half. From where she's sitting, it looks somewhat like a coffee stain if not a little darker.

  
She distracts herself from the very awkward conversation her aunt and uncle are directing at her by watching him fiddle with the beads at his throat-only two of them oddly enough.

  
Then Concerned Couple tells her about moving to New York and she crumples her empty paper cup and a pair of ribbons in a hospital bed blanket to look at them.

* * *

  
First and foremost, America sucks. Capital "S", "U", "C", "K", everything like they keep insisting in class. Math isn't that bad for her, though that may be because of looping ninth grade so many times that she had to pay attention at one point if only so she wouldn't draw attention for not remembering anything when she was supposed to be keeping an eye on Madoka for that thrice damned cat.

History on the other hand is-new. And interesting.

And very, very un-Japanese.

The whole unit on Japan in World History is mentioned for less than a week. The rest of the time the topic is European or American history, but-regardless-the whole class leaves her reeling with information on massacres, wars, civil wars which is very-wow. _Wow_.

Holy hell, they had had witches on top of all this other crap? How the heck was humanity alive again?

Her other classes are not as interesting or she spends them playing a frantic game of catch up with the rest of the class simply because the students here learn things she doesn't but she also knows things they don't because she was taught that earlier. The whole thing being in another language simply makes all her classes astronomically more difficult.

  
After the first week of school while ankle-deep in assignments, she decides that being a Magical Girl has nothing on trying to live through high school.

Her "adoptive cousin" Sosuke Evans- or "brother" Aunt Morita says with a smile 'because we're your new family, your new home'-gets into trouble more often than not and sticks out like a sore thumb just as much as Homura does at home if not moreso.

Now that she's not sitting bewildered in a hospital room, she can compare and _nothing_ about Uncle Henry matches what she can see in the sixteen year old boy she sees brooding on the living room couch at some anime on the TV every Saturday. For one, the eyes don't match either parent-this weird metallic grey that flash red in the right light-and there's something about his face that just doesn't quite seem to fit.

The nose, the cheekbones, the structure is all very different but while its interesting, its not anything to scream over so she makes note of it and then dismisses it entirely.

He doesn't interact with her much, doesn't partake in the regular 'welcome to the family' speech her aunt and uncle like to enact every other dinner at the dining table to various degrees of success but he also doesn't hate her which is all she really wanted or needed. That isn't to mean they're friends or that they pretend the other person doesn't exist; honestly, if Homura were to describe their relationship, its like they're reluctant roommates at best and just acquaintances at worst. There are the friendly hello's and goodbye's and 'shit I need a paperclip do you have one' but no interaction outside of those moments.

Every so often he'll walk into the house three hours after Homura gets home, despite going to the same highschool, smelling like smoke or looking like he got hit by a bus but that's not her place to judge and so she keeps her mouth quiet, ignoring it in favor of the mountain of work that follows her home on the weekdays.

  
The family themselves are rather odd to be honest. Aside from Sosuke, their "parents" are not always home. Sometimes they show up and Homura has to sit through dinner as they try to include her to the best of their ability-which is nice to some degree and annoying in others-but more often than not one of them spends a later day at the office, stumbling into the apartment sometime around midnight if not later.

Some days Homura wakes up thinking her soul is carried in a jewel smaller than her fist and that Madoka is still around, still needs to be saved only to see the red ribbons on the dresser that she ties into her hair every time she goes to school.

Some days she wakes up and doesn't know what to live for but gets up because that's what _she_ would've wanted.

Half the school year goes by in this fashion.

* * *

  
Sosuke jumps in through the window on a Saturday yelling curses followed by something very much not human. Whatever it is, its spiky, armed with spines all along the ridges that make up its back and a tail that would not be out of place on the business end of a very deadly mace.

Homura's still holding the TV remote.

The good news: Sosuke manages to get behind the couch and the ankylosaurs-tail having creature breaks half the balcony window ramming its head through an opening a fourth the size of its body.

The bad news: Homura is on the couch of all places minding her own business with a bright screen in front of her face and Sosuke dropped his weapon-is that a sword, why does a very stupid sixteen year old punk-rock Asian American kid have a sharp pointy thing anywhere in their vicinity and of course it looks like a katana he could not have been role playing any anime hero harder if he tried-on the way in, leaving it to skid further towards where she is rather than anywhere near himself.

Spikey roars, Sosuke swears and hurls something very sharp and very bronze to thunk into the meat of the thing's shoulder and Homura-like a person who voluntarily spent time with Sakura Kyouko and competed for most stubborn person with Miki Sayaka-drops the TV remote to reach for the sword frantically trying to remember every maneuver her old enemy-acquaintance used against a witch.

* * *

  
There's a tail on the floor, she thinks. Its very sharp, very spiky and there's green blood trickling out of the meatier end of it along the length of what appears to be a cleaved bone.

Around it is a pile of ash, dust, dirt that leaves the carpet in a mess worthy of Aunt Morita's angriest face and Uncle Henry's darkest smile.

The sword is clattered a ways from her closer to the tail and all she can think about is how she's kneeling in the carpet looking at what's got to be the world's closest color to barf green since Shrek.

"Holy shit", Sosuke breathes.

Homura brings her palms up to her face, sooty as they are, just to laugh.

* * *

When the tail's put away-and the sword and the dagger that Sosuke had thrown in a fit of panic-and the vacuums cleaned up as much dust as they could get it to suck out of the carpet, Sosuke sits her down on the kitchen island and talks about Gods.

"The Greek myths are real", he says cleaning his knife in the kitchen sink, "And so are their Gods, monsters and their villains. Manhattan got attacked a year or so ago and uhh", he gestures to the living room where Spikey had vaporized, "that's my day every other week if I'm lucky. So far so good? I don't blame you if you don't believe me", he laughs, his hands moving a towel faster around the blade, "heck, I didn't until two years ago."

Homura blinks at him from where she's rested her head sideways on her arms and thinks of alien cats, giant upside-down girls in the sky, and a person she rewrote time over and over for. "Okay."

Sosuke stops rubbing his knife to turn around slowly if only to look at her. His hair's a mess on his head and his white T-shirt still has an odd green splotch from where he had picked up the tail to carry it back to his room. She doubts she looks much better.

"Okay?", he says slowly dragging out the second half of the syllable. Homura huffs at him.

"Six months ago I was a magical girl looping back in time trying to stop my friend from making a contract with a cat thing only for her to later become a goddess and rewrite reality."

This time its his turn to blink at her. Then he squints, his eyebrows scrunching together as he moves to point the newly cleaned dagger at her mock seriously, "You're being sarcastic?"


	2. Chapter 2

She explains it in segments.

Not out of choice but, for one thing, its long, very personal, and not in her native tongue. It also doesn't help that Sosuke keeps taking breaks to throw up his hands or shake his head at her and it takes a while for him to resettle enough to continue.

  
(She doesn't give him names. Homura's not quite sure why she doesn't but she thinks maybe a part of her greedy dragon of a heart doesn't want to give them in fear that if she does the memories of these people that she saw every time would go up in smoke the same way the old world did, the same way M-)

  
She admits to stealing the weaponry and firepower of a small country and he grins at her, his eyes flashing.

She mentions a girl with golden curls getting her head taken off by a demonic caterpillar of a witch and his face visibly twitches into disgust.

She mentions a cat, a mermaid witch, a shield of time, a girl who keeps dying and dying and his face goes impassive.

She keeps talking and talking and a piece of her starts wondering why she ever started at all because she can't stop stumbling through the mess that were the last hundred or so months of her life and Sosuke doesn't stop her from continuing, his face blank now either in horror or awe, she doesn't know.

When she gets to the end, she feels hollow and the room feels heavy and too quiet.

  
There's white noise hidden in the quiet way the afternoon sun filters in through the broken window to shine on the living room floor and the way Sosuke has his face buried in his hands like he doesn't quite know what to do with her. Then Sosuke snorts, rubbing at his face with his hands, "So you were in love with the pink-haired girl?"

She can feel the blood flush upwards to her face and she sputters at him as he takes one look at her red face and laughs.

And suddenly the room isn't very heavy or silent at all.

  
Homura can feel her soul lighten just a little even as she reaches for the towel lying on the kitchen island next to her to throw it at Sosuke's face.

* * *

  
Her routine changes just a little. Before, her monsters were the dreams hiding behind her eyelids and the way that some days getting out of bed is harder than any other task in the world.

Now her monsters are more literal fire breathing ugly things that try to rip her cousin apart on more that one occasion and unfortunately she's grown fond of the asshole of a boy she shares the house with.

  
One day she's heading to go home after school and she sees Sosuke sprint down all three hundred meters of the school hallway cursing in another language-Greek she supposes from what he's told her-sword in one hand and the dagger's hilt clutched between the front of his teeth. He turns around the corner and takes the noise of squeaking sneakers with him.

  
Theres a moment where the other people in the hallway turn to see where the disturbance is and Homura can _see_ the moment their brains turn off because they all ignore t_he kid with the sword_ for their lockers of all things.

She hears one of the girls a couple ways down go, "Ugh, weirdo. But get this, I heard Robert's cheating on his girlfriend-" and stares at where her cousin disappeared.

There's the sound of someone laughing and a boy the size of a mountain-and they made kids this large seriously-comes walking through the hallway with an easy grace more befitting that of a big cat. No one bats an eyelash and she watches him round the corner and understands.

* * *

  
She hesitates between going in to see if she can help her cousin or leaving just in case she gets in the way. Yes, she's not useless but last time she had a sword and Sosuke didn't; this time he's got two weapons and she's got none.

  
She waits twenty minutes in the front of the school under the roof of the entrance.

Its one of those cold days in the very beginning of spring, where the air is cold but the trees are budding bringing signs of the season's near change and the reassurance that in a couple weeks the sky's would be a warmer blue, less grey.

Twenty minutes in, there are barely any people left in the school save for the few clubs still on campus and the stragglers in the library.

Twenty minutes in, Homura watches a car drive away from where it had picked up a girl with a green backpack and hefts her AP Biology textbook in one hand before heading off towards the corridor where she saw both of them-cousin and monster-disappear.

* * *

  
Its ironic that she finds them in her English classroom.

  
She's not dumb enough to swing the door open and alert the monster-and the mountain of a boy has turned more mountain and less boy from last she saw him, crumbling earth making up the torso and a mouth that turns to dust and reforms even as she watches-but luckily she doesn't have to.

The door has been swung wide off its hinges against the hallway wall and from its opening she has a clear enough vantage point of the classroom to see Sosuke against the far wall with a nasty bruise forming across his right forearm in the shape of a hand. His sword is still held in his right hand but the dagger is missing from where she can see him baring his teeth at the earth creature standing in front of her.

Neither of them notice her put her bag down on the table and pick up "Algebra 2+Trigonometry" and ready both textbooks, aiming them at Earth boy's exposed backside.

Neither of them notice until she steels herself and chucks them both with all the grace of a hippo at the thing's torso.

Earth creature's body collapses into two parts before she ducks back into the hallway, a spinning blue crystal revealing itself in the opening of its body.

From where she stands, she hears more than sees Sosuke's yell before something shatters.

A minute passes and her sweaty mess of a cousin comes through the door dagger probably put away and sword mysteriously missing to hold her two textbooks at her.

  
She gets off the wall to receive them with a sigh of relief, "I knew those textbooks could kill someone."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm aliiiiive. Calc test was shit but hey I'm hoping for a B+ and maybe an A? It wasn't terrible but it wasn't terrible in the way where you know things but you also think you might've screwed up somewhere so that's a thing.  
But yeh!  
Please leave a comment or kudos below and I hope you have a nice day :)


	3. Chapter 3

They get home at around five-at least several hours before any of the parents got home-both of them sweating from adrenaline and the weight of too many responsibillities, too many weapons-textbooks, swords, knives-weighing them down. Homura has enough grace to let Sosuke use the shower first, choosing instead to leaf through her homework for the evening, though after around ten minutes with no sound of the water running, she goes hunting for him only to catch him waving away a cloud of mist in the bathroom still musty, sweaty and just overall disgusting.

She scowls at him through the mirror.

Sosuke freezes at the sight of her reflection before wordlessly reaching backwards with his right leg to nudge the door shut.  
The lock clicks and Homura huffs as the shower sputters to life behind the door.

* * *

  
The incident never gets mentioned again, nor is the weird mist thing that she catches him waving away several times over the course of the next four months.

Earth creature apparently has siblings, many equally jock-like, equally crumbly rock headed monsters that chase after her cousin with varying degrees of efficiency. All of them have crystals for cores though the color is different every time. Sometimes they're differently versions of Spiky and other times they're different monsters altogether. 

Most of the time they manage to corner Sosuke sometime after school and Homura can try to help him out as covertly as she can.

Sometimes they catch him on weekends or before school, and she's not very useful beyond the usual excuse.

(A part of her is darkly amused at how easy it is to mislead Aunt Morita into believing certain things. The other part of her that is the pessimistic remains of a life fighting monsters in a little girl's skin thinks about the small feeling of relief that comes with seeing her cousin come home on those days-bruised, battered, but alive.)

Very rarely do they confront him while school is in session and then-then Homura is complete deadweight. Freshman do not help sophomores fight monsters. Freshman do not help make excuses for their missing sophomore cousins. Hell, freshman don't even talk to sophomores so moments like those pass with or without her knowledge and mostly without her intervention.

(There was this one time where she had grabbed the bathroom pass-a plunger of all things really-and was walking along the hallway only to see a jock waiting outside the guys bathroom, his mouth unnaturally curved into a grin and eyes a serpentine green with black slits for pupils.

She creeps up behind him from where he's watching a suspiciously still door and proceeds to try and beat him over the back of the head, plunger poised like a baseball bat with a very rubbery end.

Three seconds later when Snakey and Angry turns on her instead, a sword sprouts between its ribs and it explodes into a flurry of dust particles that fly backwards into a very familiar sputtering face. Homura remains extremely proud of herself for saluting Sosuke-shocked and dusty as he was-before walking into the girls bathroom.)

Yet, she feels as if her life has regained a form of balance from where it had been thrown off after the world reset. There are monsters instead of witches and she uses textbooks, sticks, bathroom passes instead of live rounds but she sleeps better than she has in months.

* * *

  
Two days into finals-sorry midterms buts its _March_-week Homura looks like a raccoon and she spends the hour before bed stumbling through biology and fucking _Darwin_ cursing finches, chimps and she vows to set her book on fire three times before she's even halfway through.

She's on evolution trees when someone tumbles over her window ledge and flops over onto the carpet before loudly groaning and swearing into her bedroom floor.  
Homura doesn't bat an eyelash, doesn't even turn around before saying"Shut up Sosuke, I'm studying."

Its only when the person stops mid swear that she realizes she might have made a mistake and she squints in the light of her night lamp at the body on her floor only making out a dark shape struggling to sit up before flopping down with a hiss of pain.

"This room isn't empty?" The person sounds confused and their words are vaguely slurred. Its that more than anything that has her moving the lamp light to shine on the individual in question. Curly looks up at her startled though she cares less for the fact that she's on her floor than for the fact that she's bleeding out on her bedroom floor from a nasty gash along his side. She's in a very familiar neon orange shirt with a knife clutched like a lifeline in her right hand, knuckles white along the hilt.

Homura's in her bear pajamas and is fairly sure she looks like she hasn't left her room in days. She sighs and goes over to her closet and grabs a grey shirt she hasn't worn in a while to hand over. Curly grunts and reaches over to grab it from her, pressing it against her side even before Homura asks her to, "Who are you?"

"A relative", Homura says dryly and gets up to go grab her cousin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter's a little shorter than I want it to be but it feels like a good place to stop for now so here we go. I do think we'll get into the Heroes of Olympus arc somewhere in a bit so that'll be fun. Also! I'd like it to be said now that this-as it is-ignores the plotline that was supposed to come post series and pre-Rebellion. Its kind of self-evident in the way that I started the first chapter but I did want to put it out there in case anyone's confused. Rebellion's honestly a mixed bag for me; I do like the movie series because it was really interesting and I liked the depth that it added to Homura's character instead of her being a martyr. She's kind of selfish to me along with very desperate which I felt the movie did a good job with. But yeah, as it stands I will be ignoring Rebellion for the time being.  
I hope you all have a great day and please leave a comment or kudos below. :)

**Author's Note:**

> I have a calc test Monday. What the actual fluff am I doing.  
Two things: one, this may just end up being a drabble collection (Sosuke is my trash son, I made him in five minutes and proceeded to fall in love with him even though he's a frickin OC) with odd headcanons for this universe and two, I seriously frickin thought I was done with screaming my very emo feelings on Homura Akemi. Like. Damn.  
Please leave a comment or kudos below and I hope you have a nice day :)


End file.
